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Tuesday morning, the News International reported that, according to unnamed sources, Egyptian-born terrorist Saif al-Adel has been named the temporary chief of al-Qaeda, succeeding Osama Bin Laden. Forbes named al-Adel one of the names you need to know for 2011. Here, the original post from Nov. 15, 2010, about al-Qaeda's most dangerous operative.

For the moment, Muhammad Ibrahim Makawi is still far from a household name. Outside of a small corpus of terrorism experts and national security specialists, few people are familiar with the Egyptian-born militant who is arguably al-Qaeda’s most dangerous operative. But they should be. Mounting evidence suggests that, after years of absence, Makawi—better known by his nom de guerre, Saif al-Adel (“sword of justice” in Arabic)—is back in action and spearheading a new stage in al-Qaeda’s war with the West.

Comparatively little is known about al-Adel. The 47-year-old jihadist, a former military officer, is said to have cut his teeth in Egypt’s volatile political scene during the 1980s. He reportedly served as a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the terror group responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. That activism made al-Adel a target of Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, and he fled Egypt for Afghanistan in 1988. There, he joined the jihad against the Soviet Union and gravitated to the terrorist conglomerate then being organized by Saudi financier Osama bin Laden and his intellectual mentor, Abdullah Azzam.

Al-Adel rose quickly through al-Qaeda’s ranks. He is believed to have helped mastermind the August 7, 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, which killed more than 200 people and wounded thousands. Al-Adel is also suspected of training militants, including some of the September 11th hijackers, at camps in Afghanistan and Somalia in the late 1990s.

Then came September 11th and the U.S. response. Fleeing Coalition operations in Afghanistan, al-Adel—together with other top al-Qaeda operatives like Suleiman al-Gaith and Osama bin Laden’s son, Saad—took refuge in Iran. There, he was held in a sort of protective custody for the following nine years, relegated to the sidelines of the unfolding conflict between al-Qaeda and the Western world.

All that changed earlier this year, however. This spring, al-Adel was among a number of high-value operatives released as part of a hostage swap between the Iranian regime and al-Qaeda. Al-Adel is said to have subsequently migrated to Pakistan’s unruly Waziristan region, and resumed his role as al-Qaeda’s military chief.